nomad4ever

Last night we joined our friends Nurul and Esti for a real highlight in Legian in Bali. It happens every sunday and is some kind of many Magic Moments at once – not to be missed!

The place to be is in front of Zanzibar and Blue Ocean Restaurant at Jalan DoubleSix Beach, right infront of the ocean waves. Sundays around 5.30pm it slowly starts to happen:

Locals and Expats alike bring their drums along and position themselves in a half circle, facing the glowing ball of the setting sun. Then one of them starts, drumming ahead while others fall-in to follow. Soon after everything is a crazy, amazing, multi-drumming, dancing, chanting, bombastic sound scene. :-)

As beach walkers, sun worshippers, tourists and other crowds gather to check out the commotion, the rhythm intensifies and doesn’t stop until the sun disappears about 1-2 hours later. The crowds get ecstatic, cheer and applaud while others dance to the revolving tunes and jump around in the soft black sands.

Families with their kids sit in the sand and are watching the spectacle. Locals and tourists sit and watch while drinking a Beer Bintang or a cup of Arak or two. Everyone is happy, you can see smiles on hundreds of faces. It’s a peaceful, exciting and chilling atmosphere, with everyone truly enjoying themselves.

As the dark crawls in, Fire Dancers suddenly appear out of nowhere and throw their burning sticks and pendulums through the air, around their bodies, all while the drums keep going. It’s really a bizarre and fascinating spectacle, like on an old medieval market.

Those Fire Dancers are amazing! What a sight! They throw and whirl their torches in the air, at some stage there are 5 of them all at the same time in a small spot. Everyone is forming different figures and shapes with their fire torches and sticks. Some them spit alcohol into the fire, thus creating fire clouds and sudden fire blasts as additional attractions.

Just think of the drums in the background adding to the atmosphere and you can imagine a truly breath-taking scene.

After the Fire Dancers a Fire Artist draw an abstract painting right at the beach with the help of spitted fire, sand and colours directly on the canvas. It’s hard to describe what you will see.

It’s just purely magnificient and completely free to watch. Just be there on any given sunday around 5.30 to 6pm and watch the action start.

I couldn’t stop shooting pictures and filled my memory card in a short time. Shot some small videos as well. If I can figure out on how to upload them via my current dead-slow modem dial-up here, I will put them online as well. Maybe I have to check out this YouTube thingy for that and just link there.

Watch this space, will update when done, got lots of exciting material.

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Update:

Some pictures are online now. Just go to Flickr or click the Flickr-Panel on the right sidebar of this website.

The Videos are shot with the Movie Function of a Casio Exilim EX-Z60 Digital Camera, so please excuse the less than mediocre audio and video quality.

Okay, the upload to YouTube worked successfully. The link to watch the 1st video (Sexy Female Fire Dancer) is this. The embedded version is here as well:

Just a teaser for now. Unfortunately, the connection speed, even here in the “SOHO 24hr Diner” with Highspeed Wireless Internet Access in Jalan Oberoi, is still crawlingly slow. All tabs I open take forever to load.

Almost like my modem dial-up at home, haha! A mere 4.5-MByte-Video uploaded in about 35 minutes. That’s what I call true Highspeed! Seems that the Internet isn’t still back to normal after the Taiwan Earthquake. At least here in Bali. Must be that some of those sea-cables are still broken. World-wide wait! Arglglglglgll!

Guess I have to upload the rest of the Videos and the pictures for Flickr step-by-step. :-(

Oha, tuesday 1.15am – got a second one uploaded via dial-up; it shows 5 Fire Dancers at the same time. And here the embedded version:

Some pictures are online now. Just go to Flickr or click the Flickr-Panel on the right sidebar of this website.

The Fire Painter is online now as well:

This is a short one: Drummers in Action (before fall of darkness):

And another Fire Dancer alone:

This is one last short video with Drummers and Dancers from the Audience:

Technorati : arak, bali, beach, beach life, bintang, blue ocean, casio, digital camera, doublesix, drums, exilim, fire, fire dancers, indonesia, legian, movies, percussion, pictures, sun, sunset, videos, zanzibar

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written by Chris